“One of the lovely things about the Edward M. Kennedy story was that here you had a guy who everybody thought had one destiny, at which he failed utterly,” writesN.Y. Times columnist Gail Collins. “[But] who picked himself up and found his own purpose at which he was better than anybody else in the world.

“In late middle age, he built a truly spectacular career in which he probably became the Kennedy who served his country best. Kennedy was one of the worst presidential candidates ever and you couldn’t blame people for resenting this guy assuming he had an innate right to run the country solely because of his name. And after he lost, he went through a stage where he was not exactly the most admirable role model on the planet.

“But he gradually found his place and grew into a role where his own gifts worked perfectly. In late middle age, he built a truly spectacular career in which he probably became the Kennedy who served his country best.

“I hope he can be a role model not just for people yearning for a mid-life renewal but also for all the future fifth-place finishers on American Idol.”

The latest installment in Roland Emmerich‘s world-ending idiot franchise (20th Century Fox, 11.13). The height of putrid paycheck performing by John Cusack. A simultaneous appeal to the Biblical End of Days crowd and liberals convinced that global warming will usher in the worst. The usual nausea, in short.

But there’s something about massive heaving seas that fascinates me. The CG looks better than it did five years ago in The Day After Tomorrow, and much better than the work in Independence Day. I hate myself but I know I’ll be seeing this

There are real-life echoes, of course. Watch this series of iceberg-collapsing clips. Each one is accompanied by chumps going “whoaaaa!” or “Hey, I got it on video!” It’s pure entertainment for these bozos. Not once does anyone say, “Jesus, you read about global warming and hear Republicans try to deny it’s happening on the news shows but to see it live…wow.”

It’s part of the online burden these days that Hitler/bunker/Downfall mash-ups about any perceived problem with any big product or film are going to pop up on YouTube, whether we like it or not. And in a sense I’m sorry for this. That said, I laughed out loud at this. The writing is quite snappy. There are a couple of “who/that” grammar issues, but you can’t say it doesn’t reflect actual carpings.

Highlights: (a) “Cameron has spent too much time underwater, and has taken the Hollywood opiate of putting technology before story“; (b) “Who the hell wants Clone Wars: Thundercats?”; (c) “They said the 3D would be so good it’d be like having your eyeballs fucked!”; (d) “Who in their right mind would want to live vicariously through a furry ballerina who fights off space marines with his freaking organic farm?”

Here’s an expanded, more particular rewrite of my brief Cannes reaction to Jane Campion‘s Bright Star (Apparition, 9.18). I’m running this as an accompaniment to the re-tooled trailer (i.e., the original narrator having been dumped) that recently posted.

Bright Star is about the subdued and conflicted passions that defined the brief love affair between poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and seamstress Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) from 1818 until Keats’ death, at age 25 from tuberculosis, in 1821.

By Campion’s particular scheme it’s been done quite perfectly. I was especially taken with Greig Fraser‘s Vermeer-lit photography, which reminded me of John Alcott ‘s lensing of Barry Lyndon. It’s part of the film’s immaculate fealty for the textures and tones of early 19th Century London, and a devotion to capturing the kind of love that is achingly conveyed in hand-written notes that are hand delivered by proper young fellows in waistcoats. You know what I mean.

But it struck me nonetheless as too slow and restricted and damnably refined. I looked at my watch three times and decided around the two-thirds mark that it should have run 100 rather than 120 minutes. I know — a typical guy reaction, right? The pacing is just right for the time period — it would have felt appalling on some level if it had been shot and cut with haste for haste’s sake — but there’s no getting around the feeling that it’s a too-long sit.

This, I feel, is primarily because there’s no discernible heat in the Keats/Brawne relationship. Their love affair is extremely earnest and soulful as far as it goes, but it seems way too too repressed. Yes, I know — this is how love affairs more or less were in the early 19th Century. Notions of propriety and appearances were always paramount. But there’s no shaking the feeling that neither Keats nor Brawne seem to know the first thing about carnal splendor. Not even in their imaginings, I mean.

There’s a passage in Keat’s Wikipedia bio claiming that the posthumous publication of love letters between Keats and Brawne “scandalize[d] Victorian society.” There’s also a reference to Brawne’s “rather promiscuous reputation.” There is nothing in Bright Star that even alludes to this alleged reputation, and there’s certainly nothing in the depicted ardor between Keats and Brawne that is remotely hothouse. It’s all hat, no cattle.

Whatever the truth of the nature of their real-life relationship, Campion chose to keep it all chaste and contained.

As Keats’ friend and financial supporter Charles Armitage Brown, Paul Schneider quickly becomes infuriating. Brown is straight but he resents Fanny/Cornish with the emotional frenzy of a gay man fighting for the attentions of a sometime male lover, and he boorishly gets in her face each and every time she tries to speak to Keats. He’s an obnoxious dog. After a half hour I wanted him killed.

I also began to dream about someone besides Cornish playing Brawne. She’s a skilled actress who gives herself over to the life and mind of this 19th Century seamstress, but bit by bit and scene by scene I began to resent her somewhat chubby balloon face, and how her hair pulled tightly into that prudish bun only accentuates this. Cornish began to almost seem too big for Whishaw. Her head certainly seemed a bit heavier and thicker than his, and I began to wonder if she physically outweighed him. I began to imagine wrestling matches between the two, and the look of triumph on Cornish’s face as she pins this little candy-ass to the floor.

Bright Star is basically a Masterpiece Theatre thing that my mother will love. I’m not putting it down on its own terms. I mostly felt admiration for Campion’s careful arranging of the elements. But I finally found it a bit cold and remote, and a bit too long for what it delivers.

It was the fall of ’03 when I spoke to Dominick Dunne about Play It As It Lays (’72), the affluent-existential-despair Hollywood drama that he produced for Universal, and which Frank Perry directed. The film was about to play at the American Cinematheque and I was trying to drum up support for a DVD release. Here it is six years later and Play It As It Laysstill isn’t on DVD. But Dunne died today at age 83, so I thought I’d re-run my ’03 piece in his honor.

“There’s this better-than-pretty-good film about wealthy jaded Hollywood types called Play It As It Lays, and I’ll bet $50 bucks right now almost no under-40 person reading this column has heard of it, much less seen it.

“The director was the once-very-hot Frank Perry (Diary of a Man Housewife, Rancho Deluxe, Mommie Dearest), and it was based on a respected 1970 Joan Didion novel of the same name, which Ben Stein once called ‘the best novel about Hollywood ever.’

“It stood out, as I recall, for its unusually dark and nihilistic portrait of some very skewed souls in the employ of the film industry, and for Perry’s fragmented, back-and-forth cutting that was not only in keeping with the style in which Didion’s book was written, but with the randomness of thoughts flicking around inside the head of its main character, Maria Wyeth (Weld).

“It was gloomy, ambitious, ‘different’ (even by unconventional ’70s standards), and Persona-like. It had a chilly, almost spooky fascination with downer attitudes among the moneyed elite. Some of the big gun critics bashed it, but others were admiring and spoke of Oscar-level achievement.

“And to judge by press clippings I read at the Academy library on Monday, it enjoyed a particular popularity among smart cultivated women, as it seemed to express a certain anguished something-or-other about female suffering in rarified circles in the early ’70s. It also seemed to play fairly well with gay guys.

“I caught Play It As It Lays sometime in the late ’70s at a Manhattan repertory house, and I remember being struck by the total absence of a musical score. Not a damn note. The most persistent aural effect is the sound of traffic. That’s the ’70s for you, baby.

“Now, it’s one thing for a good or interesting film to slip into semi-obscurity, but Play It As It Lays has flat-out disappeared.

“That’s because it’s been out of circulation for 30 years. It’s never seen the flourescent light of a video store (as a VHS, laser disc or DVD), and there’s no mention on the internet of it ever having played on television. Search for it on the Movie Review Query Engine (www.mrqe.com) and not a single capsule review turns up.

“Calls to Universal, the negative and rights owner, indicated there’s not much awareness of this film, much less any intention to put it out on DVD. But you never know.

“All I can say is that this stylish mood piece is too heady and distinctive and was too well-reviewed during its time (by a good percentage of the critics at least, some of whom really went apeshit over it) to warrant invisibility today.

“This article is an attempt to get the Universal crew to wake up and put this sucker out on DVD, and I’m not talking about one of those bargain-basement, no-frills jobs.

“Laurent Bouzereau, the maker of dozens of brilliant DVD documentaries over the years, should be hired to assemble a looking-back doc while the participants are still around and kicking. I’m thinking especially of star Tuesday Weld, Didion (her novelist husband John Gregory Dunne, who co-wrote the script, passed away earlier this year), and producer Dominick Dunne, a plugged-in Hollywood player before his later incarnation as a novelist and Vanity Fair feature writer.

“Truth be told, Play It As It Lays sometimes feels like a bit much in terms of its despairing tone and existential hairshirt attitude. But at least it tries to disturb and provoke and point moral fingers and yet — at the same time, perversely — recreate the roguishly sexy aroma of early ’70s Hollywood so that audiences can feel what the tingle was all about.

“I mean, listen to these tributes…

“‘Once every few years, a film so spectacular and intense that it creates a whole new vocabulary for film grammarians comes along,’ enthused The Hollywood Reporter‘s Nick Yanni. ‘Such a picture is Play It As It Lays.’

“The L.A. Times’ Charles Champlin declared it a new-styled ‘woman’s picture…drawn from a rarified part of Hollywood….a sub-sub-subculture,’ and said it ‘does depict its tiny exotic world with merciless skill and sobering accuracy.’

“Writing in the New York Times, film critic and novelist Ann Birstein called it ‘a study of nihilism’ that she felt ‘fascinated, moved and stunned by,’ adding that it was ‘one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.’

“The Film Journal also called it ‘one of the best films of the year.’

“Cosmopolitan film critic Liz Smith (back in the days when she was a reasonably tough and honest writer) said in a column she wrote in early November ’72 that ‘unless something extraordinary happens between now and the end of the year, Play It As It Lays will be my Oscar bet for just about the best of everything.’

“Saturday Review critic Thomas Meehan said ‘if nothing else, it is Vogue-ishly chic in its vision of L.A. and environs as contemporary Hell, in the manner of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point.’

“There were other reviews — some of them not friendly. (Pauline Kael ripped it to shreds.) But all things considered, does this film sound like it should have sat at the bottom of a dark well for the last three decades? When critics say ‘best of the year,’ it usually means the presence of something honorable.

Joan Didion

“My own recollection is that Play It As It Lays was certainly above average. I recall it taking the measure of the void in ways that seemed ripe and head-turning.

“‘The corruption and venality and restrictiveness of Hollywood have become…firm tenets of American’s social faith — and of Hollywood’s own image of itself,’ Joan Didion wrote in an essay 30-plus years ago.

Then as now, it follows that people high up in the Hollywood food chain have a reputation for living spiritually arid or perverted lives, and more than a few of them being very sick puppies. I don’t know how many books and movies have used the old Hollywood Babylon thing as an atmospheric starting point since Didion’s prescient pronouncement, but I think we can safely say ‘a lot.’

“Weld’s Maria character (it’s pronounced Mar-eye-ah and not Mar-EE-ah) walks around in a state of shutdown. She doesn’t seem to be in pain as much as caught up in some kind of drifting, unable-to-play-the-game-anymore mentality. Maria’s life doesn’t seem to amount to anything purposeful or self-directed as she only seems to function as an enervated wife, friend or lover to this or that Hollywood player-with-a-penis. It has failed, in any event, to coagulate for her in a way that feels rooted or worth being a part of.

“The film is Maria’s recollection of her recent past as she recovers from some kind of breakdown in a sanitarium. She has gotten divorced from her director husband (Adam Roarke), partly due to his rage over her having had an abortion after getting pregnant by one of her lovers (Richard Anderson). She has an emotionally disturbed daughter who barely speaks. One of her core sentiments, repeatedly jotted down during her stay at the facility, is that ‘nothing applies.’

“There’s a scene in which Maria, B.Z. and B.Z.’s wife (Tammy Grimes) are driving in a car, and Maria has just said something very spacey and who-cares? ‘You’re getting there,’ B.Z. says to Maria. ‘Where?’ she asks. ‘Where I am,” B.Z. answers. His wife quickly rejoins, ‘Where you are is shit.’

“The movie has lots of acidic, bitter-pill dialogue like this, a good portion of it dished out by Perkins. Kael said that ‘when his lines are dry, [Perkins] is the best thing in the picture.’

Ned Tanen

“I remember a scene at a party in which a gangster-producer type named Larry Kulick (Paul Lambert) looks at a young woman and says out loud, ‘I’d like to get into that,’ and Perkins, standing next to him and Maria and staring blankly into the crowd, saying, ‘I wouldn’t exactly call it the impossible dream.’

“And for some reason I’ve never forgotten the way Perkins delivers a smirking line about artificial lemons: ‘They’re not artificial — they’re reconstituted.’

“The film also has a nice assortment of sleazy second-bananas — a grossly egoistic TV actor (Tony Young, who comes on to Maria as she’s watching B.Z. and his lover play tennis by saying, ‘Why don’t you dump the fags?’), a pudgy assistant to an abortionist with a thing for Camaro’s (Chuck McCann), and Tyne Daly (extremely slim in those days) as an obsequious journalist interviewing Roarke during a desert location shoot.

“I called John Gregory Dunne on Monday to see whether he or Joan Didion had heard of Play It As It Lays playing anywhere in any format, or whether they’d heard of any plans to put it out on DVD, and he said no.

“Then I rang Dominick Dunne, his brother, at his Connecticut home. He said he hadn’t thought of the film in a long time (‘You know, you move on…’), but he seemed to enjoy dredging up more and more anecdotes as we talked.

“Dunne reminded me that Tuesday Weld’s performance won a Best Actress award at the 1972 Venice Film Festival. He also recalled that he gave Joel Schumacher his start by hiring him as the film’s costume designer. ‘He was doing the windows at Henri Bendel’s, and he went on from this and never looked back,’ he says. ‘It was also Joel who brought Berry Berenson out to the set to meet Tony Perkins, and out of that she and Tony got married.’

“Berenson’s life ended on September 11, 2001. She was a passenger on American flight #11 that slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

“Dunne said he’s very proud of the picture and agreed it was quite admired in its day. ‘It was never a hit but there were some people who were just passionate about it,’ he said. ‘But we also had a studio chief who hated the movie, just hated it, and he would say this to anybody…’

Tony Perkins in Play It As It Lays

“‘Ned Tanen, the head of Universal at the time, hated the book and called [the script] a piece of shit on our first meeting…he was the most awful man,’ Dunne recalled. ‘They only did it…they only made it because Frank Perry had a hit at Universal a year or two before [i.e., Diary of a Mad Housewife], and Frank wanted to direct this movie… but Tanen hated ever single day’s dailies, and he was the most awful person. It was so bitter. [Tanen died early this year.]

“‘I was on a coast-to-coast flight on MGM Grand a few years later, and I was seated right next to Ned Tanen — he on the window, me on the aisle. Our elbows twice touched during lunch, but we never spoke to each other for the five-hour flight. Kevin Bacon was on the plane, and one point he came over to talk to us and he went on about this and that, thinking we were together…it was so unpleasant.’

“I called the mostly-retired Tanen to get his side of this story, but he didn’t reply. For what it’s worth, a former studio chief who’s known Tanen for years reminded me that his behavior was partly due to his being manic depressive, or what would now be called bi-polar.

“‘[Tanen] was crazy in a colorfully Hollywood way and would not fit into a studio job today,’ the former exec recalled, ‘but when he was up or on he was the most exciting and charming guy you’d ever want to meet.’

“I don’t know how to end this except throw in another quote from the film.

“It comes at the very end. Maria, having struggled her way through into a semblance of hope or sanity after reviewing what a mess everything has been, says to herself, ‘I know what nothing is, and keep on playing.’ The voice of B.Z., who has committed suicide by Seconal, is then heard to ask ‘why?’

“Weld looks at the camera, smiles serenely, and delivers what I consider one of the most cheerful closing lines in movie history.

Michael Cieply‘s N.Y. Times story about a controversial decision to close a Motion Picture and Television Fund old folks’ home in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley is, stunning surprise, a portrait of greedy corporate priorities leading to less-well-off folks possibly getting tossed into the street. (Metaphorically speaking, of course.) All I know is that my mom is in an assisted-care facility, and while it’s a very nicely run facility with caring assistants, there’s kind of a creepy waiting-for-the-end atmosphere in these places that really doesn’t feel right. I would much rather keel over on a busy street in Paris at age 77 than slowly wither away in one of these homes and die at age 89 or whenever. Seriously.

There are days when I feel as if I’m covered with liquid chewing gum or taffy or gelatin or something. I try to think and type and shift gears and get to my check-list of things to do. But something stronger than myself has hit the slow-motion button or something. I have trouble lifting my arms. Or my eyebrows. So much to do that I can’t seem to do anything. And then this thing turned up a few minutes ago. No matter how hard you work to make your point understood with precisely the right English and emphasis, most people are going to convert what you write into slogans and cheap ghoulash.

I’ve watched and re-watched this Lovely Bones trailer, and I’m still locked into two basic impressions. One, Alice Sebold‘s novel has been heavily milked, which is to say given a florid Jacksonesque tone (’70s-era impressionism mixed with a kind of otherwordly photo-realism) with plot points heavily telegraphed. Jackson isn’t going to let anyone imagine anything for themselves — he’s going to damn well point stuff out.

And two, there’s an excellent reason for the florid vibe considering the post-mortal vantage point of Saoirse Ronan‘s character. So there’s a certain rhyme and reason to it all.

I never felt that the story told by Terrence Malick‘s The New World really worked, particularly the last third, but I’ve always been in love with the primeval splendor of the thing. As I tried to explain in my initial review: “[During] those first two thirds, The New World is a truly rare animal and movie like no other…a feast of intuitive wow-level naturalism that feels as fresh and vitally alive as newly-sprouted flora.”

Which is why I intend to purchase the forthcoming New World “Extended Cut” Blu-ray. For those first two thirds, I mean. It runs 172 minutes (despite the Amazon page stating otherwise) or 22 minutes longer than the 150-minute version that had a brief theatrical run in late ’05 before New Line Cinema honchos freaked and leaned on Malick to trim it back to 135 minutes for a somewhat wider release that began, as I recall, in late January.

I have this feeling that more and more people are coming around to this point of view. That despite the disappointing last-third turn The New World is one of the greatest dive-in-and-live-in-the-realm movies of all time. A movie clearly uninterested for the most part in telling a gripping story but one that atmospherically mesmerizes in such a way that it feels like somebody put mescaline in your tea.

“It is so refreshing to see such poetic images that can speak luminous volumes in a modern epically proportioned film. Based on the classic Pocahontas and John Smith legend, director Terrence Malick scripted this penetrating drama of conflict between Native Americans and English settlers in the 17th century ‘New World’. The heart of each film in Malick’s sporadic oeuvre must be cinematography. This is shot in Virginia by Emmanuel Lubezki, and continually overwhelms us with beauty, wild detail and washes us clean like a breath of mountain air. With organic precision [and] the grace of your senses, ‘masterpiece’ seems an understatement.”

What was wrong with the last third? I believed in the current between Colin Farrell and whatsername who played Pocahantas, and I felt betrayed when he suddenly bailed on her and went back to England. And I resented Christian Bale stepping in and trying to take Farrell’s place. And I couldn’t have cared less about all that royal court in England stuff. Pocahantas dying young didn’t seem to mean much. It’s what happened, yes, but it’s not what I wanted to see.

Some of us don’t remember how badly The New World was ripped by several big-name critics when it first opened.

Salon‘s Stephanie Zacaharek said Malick “may not care much for people, but he never met a tree he didn’t like.” (Somebody previously said this when The Thin Red Line came out, only they used “leaf” instead of “tree.”) Zacharek called it “so much atmospheric tootle” and said Malick’s “idea of using actors in a movie is straight out of ‘Where’s Waldo?'”

The L.A. Weekly‘s Scott Foundas calls it “suffocating…a movie less interested in expanding the boundaries of narrative cinema than in forsaking them.”

The hands-down funniest blurb was from Mike Clark’s USA Today review: “That sound you’re about to hear is the cracking of spines as Terrence Malick enthusiasts like me bend over backward trying to cut The New World a break.”

Second prize went to e-Film Critic’s Eric Childress: “Between the Smith-wanna-poke-a-hontas relationship, the seditious behavior back in Jamestown and the fear of the naturals that their kindness may be turned against them, a story as vast of The New World should serve as more than just a footnote in American history and a stain on the art of storytelling for all eternity.”

I wonder if any of these critics or anyone who dismissed The New World four and a half years ago have started to come around to it?

It will be a travesty if the Massachusetts political process somehow fails to quickly appoint a liberal, public-option supporting replacement for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy — obviously the thing to do in the wake of his passing last night. Kennedy’s greatest legislative dream was to enact meaningful health-care reform. For his voice not to be posthumously heard during the Senate roll call would be an obscenity.

As Sarah Wheatonreports this morning in the N.Y. Times, “One of Senator Kennedy’s last public acts before he died on Tuesday was an emotional plea to Massachusetts state lawmakers that they replace him quickly upon his death.

“Though he did not cite any issues specifically, his note was viewed as an acknowledgment that his absence would leave uncertain not only the identity of his replacement, but also the essence and fate of health care reform, his most cherished legislative goal.

“In the letter, dated July 2, Mr. Kennedy asked lawmakers to amend the state’s rules and grant the governor the power to appoint his successor until a special election could be held.

“‘It is vital for this Commonwealth to have two voices speaking for the needs of its citizens and two votes in the Senate during the approximately five months between a vacancy and a special election,’ he wrote.

“While Massachusetts voters would likely vote in another Democratic senator, any delays caused by a special election could hinder efforts by the party to corral the 60 votes needed in the United States Senate to move health care legislation forward.

“But the effort to find a quick replacement for Mr. Kennedy may prove complicated. In the week before his death, reaction to his request on Beacon Hill ranged from muted to hostile. The state’s Democrats found themselves in the awkward position of being asked to reverse their own 2004 initiative calling for special elections in such instances.

“Until that year, Massachusetts law called for the governor to appoint a temporary replacement if a Senate seat became vacant. But when Senator John Kerry, a Democrat, was running for president in 2004, the Democratic-controlled state legislature wanted to deny the governor at the time — Mitt Romney, a Republican — the power to name a successor if Mr. Kerry won. The resulting law requires a special election within 145 to 160 days after the vacancy occurs.

“‘The hypocrisy is astounding,’ the state House minority leader, Bradley H. Jones Jr., told The Boston Globe on Thursday. ‘If we had a Republican governor right now, would we be getting the same letter?’

“Even if Mr. Kennedy’s death prompts a change of heart, the state legislature is not set to return until after Labor Day.